Immigrant Russian Women in Helsinki: Beyond Stereotyping and Stigmatization
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Immigrant Russian Women in Helsinki: Beyond Stereotyping and Stigmatization Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Anthropology Sarah Lamb, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts by Evgenia Markvardt May 2013 Copyright by Evgenia Markvardt © 2013 CONTENTS ACKNOWELDGEMENTS 4 ABSTRACT 5 NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY AND TRANSLATION 6 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 7 CHAPTER 2: RUSSIA AND FINLAND: HISTORIC AND SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT OF OTHERNESS 20 CHAPTER 3: BEING A RUSSIAN IN FINLAND: CONSTRUCTING NATIONAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITY WITHIN THE IMMIGRANT REALITY 36 CHAPTER 4: ACTING LIKE A RUSSIAN WOMAN: COOKING, CLOTHES AND CHILDREN 54 CHAPTER 5: NAVIGATING THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE: RUSSIAN FEMALE MINORITY IN FINLAND TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE 77 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY 96 Я посвящаю эту работу моим любимым маме и бабушкe. I dedicate this work to my beloved mother and grandmother. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Sarah Lamb, for her continuous encouragement and enthusiasm for my research. Professor Lamb’s positive outlook and insightful feedback made this extensive project seem feasible even at the most challenging stages. I would also like to express my gratitude to the entire Anthropology Department of Brandeis University, which offered me the opportunity to delve into the discipline that I have grown so fond of. I would also like to thank Professor Irina Dubinina for the many cups of tea and thought-provoking conversations we shared in her office. This thesis would have never been possible without the sincere interest and time of all the women I interviewed, who shared their life stories with me. I will never be able to fully express my thankfulness to my family and friends—I would not be the person I am today without their help and support. 4 ABSTRACT Russian citizens currently constitute the second largest immigrant group in Finland; Russian women represent well over a half of all Russian immigrants. Statistically, a Russian woman is most likely to migrate due to her marriage to a Finn. This visible gender discrepancy in favor of Russian female immigrants only further perpetuates the widely spread stereotype of Russian women as “prostitutes.” Judging gazes on public transportation, poor customer service and inappropriate sexual comments are only a few examples of how the frequently implicit stereotype can affect Russian women’s everyday lives. By using my informants’ narratives as a lens for this study, I explore how the existing stigmatization impacts the ways in which Russian female immigrants in the Helsinki area construct and experience their identities. I argue that women use their agency to shape their national/cultural and gender identity in order to disassociate from the publically homogenized and stereotyped image of Russian female immigrants in Finland. Moreover, I explore how the women’s identity as immigrants offers them flexibility to renegotiate their identity boundaries and create a public image that reflects more appropriately their ideas of self. By focusing on the stories of particular immigrant women, this thesis contributes to understandings of globalization and transnational mobility—moving beyond broad analyses of migration patterns to see immigrants as primary agents in shaping their narratives. 5 Notes on Terminology and Translation Unless otherwise specified, I will use the general term “Russian” to refer to former and current citizens of Russia and the Former Soviet Union, who immigrated to and currently reside in the territory of Finland. At times, I will also use “Russian” to specifically highlight one’s Russian ethnicity in contrast to other ethnic identities, such as Ukrainian, Ingrian and Byelorussian, represented in the territory of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. I will then use “Russian speakers,” when encompassing ethnic Russians as well as those who emigrated from various former Soviet Republics (for ex. Estonia, Ukraine, and Belorussia) and speak Russian as their native tongue. I will use the terms “Ingrian-Finns,” “Ingrian-Finnish” and “Ingrians” interchangeably to refer to ethnic Finns born in the territory of the Former Soviet Union. I will use the term “returnee” to refer to Ingrian-Finns who immigrated to Finland based on Finnish ethnic heritage. Therefore, the terms “Russian,” “Russian speaker,” “Ingrian,” “Ingrian- Finn” or “Ingrian-Finnish,” and “returnee” could potentially be used to describe one and the same individual. “Nordic” commnonly refers to the countries of Norway, Sweden and Finland. For the readers’ convenience I translated excerpts from interviews from Russian and Finnish to English. If the English translations, however, did not fully convey the original meaning, I either edited them accordingly or offered the Russian/Finnish version in square brackets. 6 Chapter 1: Introduction In July of 1989 my grandmother married a Finnish man and emigrated from the Soviet Union to North Karelia, the Finnish part of the Karelian Republic.1 Shortly after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I was born, and my family started the complicated process of living between Russia and Finland. I vaguely remember the stressful border crossings on the Moscow-Helsinki train. My father had to hide Finnish marks under his shoe insoles in fear of foreign currency confiscation by Russian customs officials, and my mother had to file a declaration form for her wedding ring as we exited Russia in order to make sure she could bring it back as a “legal possession.” As I now reconstruct my family narrative based on historic facts and personal memories, I better understand the pressure my grandmother might have experienced as she decided to marry a foreigner. During the Soviet regime it was practically impossible to have any interactions with foreign citizens; they were not allowed to enter the USSR and those who did were strictly monitored. Furthermore, a Soviet individual could have been suspected for “state betrayal” or assisting in criminal acts of espionage if maintaining any connection with a foreign citizen. In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika2 brought in a series of economic, political and social reforms that, although contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and created wide social unrest, also allowed for more freedom of expression and inquiry. My grandmother married a foreigner and left the USSR as the country was undergoing a period of uncertainties and disillusions. She did not know yet that the next time she 1 Karelia is a region that is split between Russia and Finland, with its largest territory being on the Russian side. Historically the eastern border of Finland has shifted several times and until today there are ethnic Finns living in Russian Karelia. 2 The term literally translates as “restructuring” and refers to the change in USSR’s political and economic system triggered by its last leader (1985-1991) Mikhail Gorbachev. 7 would return for a visit, she would already enter the Russian Federation and not the USSR. My grandmother was one of the first few Russian immigrants to enter Finland during the 1990s; my mother and I followed her in early 2000. Immigration has always been and remains a central part of my own as well as my family’s identity. Moreover, the immigration I have experienced has had a gendered bias from the start—it was my grandmother’s relationship with a Finnish man that “helped us” move to a country with higher standards of living, functioning social services and, what some regard as, the best free public education system in the world. A sense of indebtedness to the Finnish people was literally transferred to me with mother’s milk as I drank infant formula my grandmother brought from Finland on her visits to our crammed khrushchyovka.3 “Tshhh! Don’t speak so loudly!” was a phrase I frequently heard my grandmother tell me, my mother or any of our friends who visited her new Finnish hometown close to the North Karelian border with Russia. There, the suddenly increased number of Russian immigrants in the early 1990s was a big novelty and a matter of public puzzlement. To my grandmother, openly speaking in Russian in public somehow revealed our foreign identity, as if the huge fur hats [ушанки]4 did not already do so. As a child, I quickly learnt that being Russian was something that had to be concealed. I did my part by learning Finnish when playing with other children, watching Finnish Moomin cartoons and excessively eating licorice candies, the absolute favorite of many Finnish children, until I also started to like them. 3 Commonly used term to refer to apartment buildings that were rapidly constructed and intended for temporary use and accommodation of growing city populations across the Soviet Union during Nikita Khrushchev’s time. 4 Here I refer to the typical Russian fur hats with earflaps that can be tied either at the crown of the hat or down at the chin. These hats are a common scene in Russian until today, when in Finland they used to be the easiest way to spot Russian tourists. 8 As I grew older, however, I often overheard public references to Russian immigrant women as “prostitutes” [ilotytöt]. In my grandmother’s small town, it was not too unusual to observe a group of drunken Finnish men on a Friday night to scream out “venäläinen huora” [Russian whore] or “venäläinen lutka” [Russian bitch] to several Russian females as they were passing by. In addition to potential verbal abuse resulting from this humiliating stereotype, I also heard my grandmothers’ friends complain about having experienced poor customer service. Judging looks on public transportation or in grocery store cashier lines were also typically mentioned in my informants’ narratives. Some have even claimed that they were “intentionally” subjected to a security check at a mall, because they were suspected for stealing (Interview #11).